In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.”
Modest revered his older brother’s talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for “The Queen of Spades,” Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together.
Pyotr’s response to the letter was measured but blunt. “Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write ‘The Queen of Spades,’” adding: “I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like ‘The Queen of Spades’ does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.”
Then Klenovsky dropped “The Queen of Spades.” Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed.
And so “The Queen of Spades,” which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest’s attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr’s shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the “first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.” It’s a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy.
When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn’t easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And “The Queen of Spades” is short; Taruskin counts the text at “barely 10,000 words.”
If there was anyone for the job, it was Pyotr. About 10 years earlier, he pulled off adapting Pushkin with “Eugene Onegin,” one of the most beloved works in all of Russian literature. And that was a case of spinning gold from straw: Pushkin’s source material, while celebrated for its cynical commentary on high society and innovative use of prose, does not have a plot designed to necessarily sustain the attention of an opera audience. (For those reasons, Modest, when Pyotr shared his plans for “Onegin” with him, was intensely critical. “Let my opera be unstageable, let it have little action,” Pyotr retorted. “I am enchanted by Pushkin’s verse, and I write music to them because I am drawn to it. I am completely immersed in composing the opera.”)
Pyotr mostly adapted the text for “Onegin” on his own. Any deficiencies in the libretto are compensated by his sonorous, impassioned score. You could say the same for “The Queen of Spades.” Modest softened Pushkin’s austerity without diluting the menace. Tchaikovsky’s music, in turn, amplified the emotional stakes, drawing the listener into the characters’ inner worlds.
When Modest was brought on to write the libretto for “The Queen of Spades,” recommended to Klenovsky by Vsevolozhsky, he was still in the process of paving his own artistic path. Unlike the prodigious Pyotr, Modest lacked tenacity and diligence, and often abandoned projects before finishing them. He tried his hand at law, fiction, criticism, translation and drama, with varying success. In his early career, Modest tried and failed to collaborate with Pyotr at least twice: once for the concert overture adapted from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1874, and again three years later for an opera based on Charles Nodier’s 1837 novel “Inès de las Sierras.” Pyotr rejected both while encouraging his brother’s literary talent.
The brothers wrote to each other often. Pyotr looked forward to Modest’s letters, in part because he “wrote them with the grace of Sévigné.” He wrote to Modest in 1874: “Seriously, you have a literary vein, and I would be very happy if it were to beat so strongly that you became a writer. Maybe at least there will be a decent libretto one day.”
Eventually, that “decent libretto” came along with “The Queen of Spades.” When Pyotr was brought on, Modest had already been working on it for over a year, under Vsevolozhsky’s and Klenovsky’s guidance. The world premiere was just a year away.
Pyotr would write the score for “Queen of Spades” abroad. He had temporarily relocated to Florence, Italy, as a creative reset. Modest remained in Russia. His libretto was workable but would need to be altered significantly to meet the composer’s and director’s demands. Story lines had to be shifted, characters added, its timeline moved to the previous century, during the reign of Catherine the Great.
Often motivated by deadlines, Pyotr created a working score in only 44 days in a fit of spectacular inspiration. Their different working modes were exacerbated by their distance. Pyotr arrived in Florence with only the first scene of text. When he finished a scene, he sent it back and eagerly awaited a new scene by mail. Modest could not keep up with his brother’s speed. Pyotr made adjustments to nearly every scene to fit the score, and on several occasions, he was unhappy with Modest’s verses and provided the text himself, including for Lisa’s Act I arioso “Otkuda eti slyozy” and Prince Yeletsky’s Act II aria “Ya vas lyublyu.”
How “The Queen of Spades” was created is less a reflection of the Tchaikovsky brothers’ differences in artistic approach than their similarities and proclivities. Although Modest had a twin brother, Anatoly, it was recorded that Pyotr and Modest, too, had identical qualities. The actor Yuri Yuriev, who mentioned Modest several times in his memoirs, once described him as “Pyotr’s double.”
“He was so similar in everything to his older brother,” Yuriev wrote. “I am convinced that they thought, felt and perceived life exactly the same. Even their voices, manner of speaking were similar.”
At face value, this characterization of fraternal resemblance is innocuous, perhaps obvious. Pyotr, too, was aware of their likeness. “I would like to find in you the absence of at least one bad trait of my individuality, but I cannot,” he once wrote to Modest, years before their eventual collaboration. “You are too much like me, and when I am angry with you, I am, in fact, angry with myself, for you are always playing the role of a mirror in which I see the reflection of all my weaknesses.”
But Yuriev’s comments could also be interpreted as a euphemism that hints at secrets hiding in plain sight. It has been suggested that among the reasons Pyotr and Modest became so close as adults — closer to each another than to any of their other three brothers — is that they both had homosexual propensities. The scholar Alexander Poznansky, whose biographies on the Tchaikovskys uncover previously censored letters from open publication, has meticulously laid out the many correspondences Pyotr wrote to Modest about his many trysts and feelings of limerence with other men: prostitutes, conservatory students, coachmen, manservants. Few letters betray Pyotr’s shame or guilt. If anything, they are strikingly contemporary. In a footnote to one letter, Pyotr refers to a male prostitute with feminine pronouns, a custom that still exists, and that Poznansky writes was a habit among 19th-century men who would be described as gay today.
Poznansky and Taruskin theorize about Modest’s queerness as well in their writings, based on examinations of his unpublished memoirs archived at the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Kiln, Russia. These documents are not available to the public, and few other people have studied them.
One that Taruskin has cited includes Modest’s reaction to learning about Pyotr’s sexuality from his twin brother: “I am not a freak, I am not alone in my strange desires. I may find sympathy not merely with the pariahs among my comrades, but with Pyotr! With this discovery everything became different.”
Modest’s earlier contempt for himself, he wrote, “changed into self-satisfaction, and pride to belong among the ‘chosen.’”
It is apt that the brothers’ first collaboration was creating an opera based on a tale about the hoarding of a secret, one shared with only those “chosen” to know. Despite his initial reservations about the subject, Pyotr warmed up to it. Two months into the process, he wrote to Modest that “either I am terribly, unforgivably mistaken — or ‘The Queen of Spades’ will really be my chef d’oeuvre.”
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